While just about every computer user owns their own printer and is capable of producing high quality documents, the ability to produce such documents in high volume and with special finishing features, such as binding, is still within the purview of the commercial print shops and corporate copy departments. High volume, finished production of documents is typically referred to as production printing. A production printer is a printing device capable of rapid production of large volumes of documents. Typically these printers have high paper handling capacity, the ability to draw on multiple media types from multiple sources and the ability to automatically finish a document such as by adding a binding. Despite the automation provided by the production printer and the proliferation of computer technology, especially in the area of desktop publishing, production printing is still a complicated and often manual process.
In a typical print shop, customers bring in original documents which they want turned into a finished product such as a bound booklet, a tri-fold brochure or a tabbed three ring bound notebook. In addition, they typically need a large volume of the finished product, for example, one thousand brochures. The combination of the original documents plus the instructions for producing the finished product is called a “job”. The documents can be brought in either in hard copy or electronic form, such as on floppy disk, compact disc or tape or can be transmitted to the print shop over a network such as the Internet.
Documents which are delivered in a hard copy form to the print ship must first be scanned into the shop's computer system so that they can be edited and otherwise prepared for production. Typically, the shop will have a one or more scanning stations consisting of one or more workstation computers coupled with one or more production scanners. As compared to consumer grade scanner devices, production scanners are high volume devices which are capable of scanning a high volume of originals continuously at high speed and at high resolution. While scanners tend to be very accurate and reliable devices, scanning documents can still be very resource intensive especially coupled with the high volume and high speed environment of a production print shop.
In a typical operation, the operator will load a document into the scanner's automated feeder. Next, the operator will load the scanning application into the workstation, if not already loaded, and then instruct the scanner to scan the document. Once the scan is complete, the operator can view the scanned document and verify that a faithful reproduction was made. Often, however, errors occur during the scanning process which may require rescanning. Such errors include operator errors or scanner malfunctions such as dust on the scanning glass, paper mis-feeds or lamp failures. Further, sometimes the parameters of the scan, such as the image processing algorithms, contrast or color balance, need to be adjusted to account for the characteristics of the original document. These adjustments may not be apparent from a visual examination of the original document and may require several re-scans to get the parameters set correctly. For large documents, such rescanning can be time consuming and costly.
The combination of large documents, the print shop's large workload and the inevitable errors that occur requires that the scanning process be as efficient as possible. This typically translates into reducing operator errors and reducing the cost of error recovery and correction. One solution is to provide intelligent and efficient scanning applications for the operator to use on the scanning workstation which anticipate problems and offer intuitive and efficient control of the scanning operations. Unfortunately, such applications are often limited by the hardware and software interfaces to the scanners which fail to provide the necessary control over scanner operation and scanner feedback of status and event data for error detection and correction. Further, these interfaces lack the ability to allow efficient management and operation of multiple scanners or scanners which are located remotely from the scanning workstation, such as in a clean room environment.
Accordingly, there is a need for an efficient system and method for interfacing scanning applications with high volume production scanners.